Wednesday, July 30, 2014

A 1968 portrait of men of Kupang, capital of the Indonesian part of
Timor Island. I shot it while on assignment for Venture magazine to illustrate
Christopher Lucas’ article, Indonesia is
a Happening, which he later turned into a book.

To view more Indonesia photos on this blog, write that word in the search
box.

Monday, July 28, 2014

On the western slopes of Ecuador’s Andes Mountains near Santo Domingo, a
Colorado man reddens his hair with achiote, soft grains he extracted from
the green pods in the foreground. Achiote easily turns into a paste when rubbed
between hands.

In Brazil, where achiote is known as urucu, Yanomami Indians press it into
oblong balls to paint their bodies as if with markers.

To view more
Ecuador photos on this blog, write that word in the search box.

Sunday, July 27, 2014

Colorado elder with hair reddened with achiote, a general custom of his
tribe, which dwells in the lower Western Andes Mountains, near Santo Domingo de
los Colorados. That custom is at the origin of the Spanish name by which they
are best known.

To view more
Ecuador photos on this blog, write that word in the search box.

Saturday, July 26, 2014

Along a small road in the Cauca Department’s share of the Cordillera
Oriental, one of three Andean cordilleras splitting Colombia north-south, a spirited
farmer is splitting logs for her family’s fire while watching over her two
small children nearby.

To view more Colombia photos on this blog, write that word in the search
box.

Thursday, July 24, 2014

Professional people and wildlife photography are full-time jobs, and
each requires its own skills and experience. I love both people and animals but
can’t hold two full-time jobs. So I have dedicated myself to photographing people,
mostly away from tourists’ maps.

However, I have had occasional need to shoot wildlife. One of them, a few
years ago, happened in Madagascar. I was photographing the country for two books on that subject. And on their lists of needed illustrations were
the Périnet Natural Reserve and its variety of lemurs and chameleons.

Fortunately, I needed no special skills or experience to photograph chameleons and lemurs. I could have touched the chameleons. As for the lemurs, they were as curious
about me as I was about them. And, charming animals, they let me get quite
close to them too. I spent a wonderfully quite morning in their company.

Ring-tailed lemurs (lemur catta)

Verreaux's sifaka
lemur (propithecus verreaux)

Verreaux's sifaka
lemur (propithecus verreaux)

Grey bamboo lemur (hapalemur
briseus)

Brown lemur (lemur
fulvus)

Ruffed lemur (lvarecia variegata)

Ruffed lemur (lvarecia variegata)

Ruffed lemur (lvarecia variegata)

To view more Madagascar photos on this blog, write that word in the
search box.

Tuesday, July 22, 2014

In my last post, with the 15 pictures of looters of pre-Colombian graves in
Colombia, I mentioned how many of the best stolen pieces end up in the
pre-Columbian collection of Bogota’s Gold Museum. At least in 1979, at the time
I was photographing the looters at work. Hereafter are eight of the pictures I took
at the museum that year.

Funeral chamber of a pre-Columbian cacique.

Funerary mask and other gold ornaments that followed a cacique to his
grave.

Tumaco gold mask.

Calima gold mask.

Tolima breast plates.

Muisca raft carrying a new cacique, coated with gold dust, and lesser chiefs
to the middle of Lake Guatavita. There they unloaded gold and emeralds into the
lake and El Dorado, the Gilded One, ritually washed the gold dust off his body in it.

Gloomy lake Guatavita. In a vain effort to drain the lake and get hold
of its legendary treasures, greed-crazed conquistadors during the Spanish
conquest carved out the gap in the far shore.

The Gold Museum makes you enter its last room, behind heavy steel doors,
in total darkness, the better to overwhelm your eyes and mind when the lights
slowly come up. The room’s walls are lined with 12 showcases like this one, each crammed with more gold loot than the next.

To view more Colombia photos on this blog, write that word in the search
box.

Sunday, July 20, 2014

At dawn one morning, comforted by a pack of cigarettes and a bottle of aguardiente, a Colombian farmer leaves his mud-brick
house to go treasure hunting. He and four friends identified a possible
pre-Columbian grave site among many others long excavated around it and filled
in again to keep cattle safe. Somewhere in this area of the Calima culture, one
grave had once delivered 18 pounds of gold. But all the best graves have already
been sacked long ago, and expectations are relatively low.

View more photos below the text

--

In 1979, on assignment for Geo, I photographed guaqueros, or grave robbers, in Colombia’s western cordillera as
they excavated a pre-Columbian grave high amid the clouds. Geo is, and remains, a
top German magazine. It also has a French edition, and at the time it had
an American edition as well. Geo titled the story, written by Pat Rotter, Stealing the Gold of El Dorado.

The excavation of the 13-meter deep grave took two long days of hard
work by four men taking turns digging. It would have taken them considerably longer if pre-Colmbian Indians had not already broken the ground before them. Digging out such graves was as illegal in 1979 as it
is today. But there were few archaeologists available to dig the many thousands gold-filled
graves all over the country. Besides, grave robbers were hard to catch, and the
risk of seeing priceless treasures leave the country to foreign collectors had
to be minimized. So the director of the Gold Museum of Bogota, Colombia’s
capital, had no choice but to close his eyes on the theft. This gave him at
least a chance to be the first to examine, and eventually buy, the best pieces
offered to him in total liberty. Ninety percent of the astounding collection of
Bogota’s Gold Museum had been purchased from guaqueros. I don’t know how things
work today.

Colombian archaeologists were not happy with this state of affairs.
While they worked slowly to avoid losing or damaging evidence, greedy uneducated
guaqueros had no such worries. They had to work fast before getting robbed themselves. And in the end they separated
gold from other artifacts, including carbon-bearing ceramic vessels, which
helped to date the graves. But there was little archaeologists could do about
it, other than sometimes work with guaqueros to limit their damages. The fact was that if archaeologists had the science, guaqueros had the uncanny clairvoyance.

Here two of the men inspect the dirt theirmedia cañas plugged out from the site they came to
prospect. Media cañasare half-open cylindrical tools at the end of
two-and-a-half-meter-long poles. Soil is often composed of layers, like black
humus over reddish clay, for instance. However, once pre-Columbian Indians had
excavated the ground to bury a person, the dirt they later threw back into the
grave ended up in mixed colors. The guaqueros looked for mixed soil and found
it. They then kept plugging the ground until finding the exact grave pit's edge.

Taking turns to dig the grave.

Lowering a bucket to be refilled by the man below after having been emptied above.

As the excavation advances, a
manigueta, or hand-turned winch, has been installed to lower a man into it.
It would serve to extricate him from the hole once another man’s turn to dig
would come.

The kneeling man with the striped shirt, Guillermo Cano, directed the
operation. Son and grandson of guaqueros, he himself had sold to the Gold
Museum more than a third of its collection of 28.000 pieces. According to a
1991 article in El Tiempo, a
Colombian newspaper, Guillermo’s grandfather had fallen into a pre-Columbian
grave while repairing a road as an underpaid laborer. That grave, loaded with
18 pounds of gold, had initiated the family’s guaquero tradition. In 1968,
Dory, Guillermo’s wife, started a gallery selling perfect commercial reproductions
of pre-Columbian gold pieces and other jewelry and ornaments. The gallery since then has
multiplied in several Colombian cities. One of Guillermo’s sons is now an
archaeologist.

Working the manigueta.

Six meters below the surface, less than half-way down, the digging man's bent back is hardly visible. The
holes in one of the well’s walls had allowed the ancient Calima excavators to get up
and down it as needed.

To get some of my pictures, I, too, had to go down the pit sometimes. My camera bag traveled down separately.

Finally, as dusk loomed at the end of the second day, the guaqueros touched bottom. They allowed me to quickly go down a last time before they would empty the grave, fearful that other farmers might come and do it during the night. It was so dark down there that I could not see what I was shooting. I also had some trouble breathing. So I blindly shot flash pictures at random all around the grave. This picture here shows the alcove where the body was laid to rest and some of the artifacts that accompanied it. Nested inside the alcove, the dead was not touched by the dirt that was thrown back into the pit after the burial.

As night fell, the grave was quickly emptied. The most exciting piece, taken away too quickly for me to photograph it, had everyone very excited. No one had ever seen anything like it. It was a clay vessel nearly a meter long with a wonderful head—big nose and ears.

Not much gold, however. Only two nose
rings, a thin one and a thick one, the latter weighing five grams. But then,
the grave wasn’t very old--probably from between A.D. 1200 and 1500.

Later in Pasto, in the country’s south, I found more impressive gold
jewelry in the hands of another guaquero.

Then In Bogota, on two different days and shabby hotel rooms, I was
allowed to photograph the man in black buying pre-Columbian antiquities from a guaquero to resell to collectors.

That same man, sitting in the middle of the bed, as he was ready to write a check.

To view more Colombia photos on this blog, write that word in the search
box.

Thursday, July 17, 2014

In 1967, during my four-month journey around Morocco’s High Atlas
Mountains photographing several Berber tribes, I was treated everywhere like a
long-lost friend. There was no electricity, no television. But there was a
heartwarming social life.

Except when dancing to celebrate a Moslem festival, women and men kept
apart from each other. Men with men and women with women. But both sexes always
worked and played and chatted in often large friendly groups. Everyone cared
for the other. And they all cared for me.

They worked hard in the fields, in the kitchens, and at the distaffs and
looms. And they played just as hard, as if they never tired. Even after a long
work day, the women leapfrogged and the men played a local variety of hockey.
Or they used rag balls in other spirited games, like this one, as the long
March night was looming.

To view more
Morocco photos on this blog, write that word in the search box.

Monday, July 14, 2014

In 1982, on assignment to illustrate a Time-Life book on Brazil’s
Yanomami Indians, I shared those wonderful people’s lives for a month. Thanks
to Bruce Albert, a young anthropologist who spoke their language and was deeply
loved by them, I never missed a good photo opportunity. The book was part of a series called People of the
Wild.

To view more
Yanomami photos on this blog, write that word in the search box.

Friday, July 11, 2014

In the late seventies I spent some weeks photographing life in several slums
of Lima, Peru, including that of Villa Salvador, out in the desert, where I
shot this picture. As usual, I enjoyed myself most around children. I could not
have made them happier if I had brought them ice cream. They were grateful for
my attention and expected nothing else from me. They did not know they were
poor and could not have behaved better towards me.

To view more
Peru photos on this blog, write that word in the search box.

Thursday, July 10, 2014

I shot this bunch of students as they left school one afternoon in
Tacloban, in Philippines’ Leyte Island, ready for some fun and not the
least intimidated by the foreign photographer. I was ready for some fun myself.

To view more
Philippines photos on this blog, write the word in the search box.

Tuesday, July 8, 2014

The Montubios, as the
mestizos of Ecuador’s coastal lowlands call themselves, celebrate October 12
not as America’s Columbus Day, or Latin America’s Día de la Raza,
but as Día de los Montubios. And not just on that day but over
three. I watched all three days and found them all worth my photographer’s
time. Still, the first day was the most exciting. I did not see any foreigners
there, nor did I notice Andean Ecuadoreans, but the event, playing out most
famously in Salitre, a small town at a 40-minute taxi ride from Guayaquil, is
very local.

That first day featured a
morning parade and an afternoon rodeo. Circling the small town, the parade
was dedicated entirely to groups of folkloric dancers of all ages and
backgrounds.

The day started quietly
with elegant amazons riding through the streets of Salitre, waiting to join the
parade and obviously proud of displaying their ample dresses, which covered
their horses as in medieval times. Each of the numerous dance groups was headed
by a motorized tricycle taxi broadcasting the lively music needed to support
the colorful dancers. Though I was never a fan of parades, I enjoyed that one.

Signed Prints

There are a thousand pictures on this blog. For a limited time, I'm offering three 8 x 10 inch signed prints of any of them for only $99, shipping included to American addresses. Other sizes available. For more information write to viengleb@aol.com